Mutable materials and gathering worlds

Author(s): Christopher Watts

Year: 2015

Summary

Owing to a plethora of recent and ever more divergent scholarship on materiality, the lens through which we view the ontological status of things has become increasingly opaque. New thinking about the ways in which materials are always and already in flux compels us to consider how seemingly obdurate things can, paradoxically, transcend their own solidity. To this we may add a budding concern with the immaterial – regimes of light and sound, for example, and their mutability – and the extent to which such phenomena imbue and inform wider material meshworks. In this paper, I think through these themes with reference to the earthen enclosures of the central Great Lakes, which I argue were intended to gather together particular topographies, celestial objects, and materials as part of a broader commitment to place.

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

Cite this Record

Mutable materials and gathering worlds. Christopher Watts. Presented at The 80th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, San Francisco, California. 2015 ( tDAR id: 396839)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

min long: -104.634; min lat: 36.739 ; max long: -80.64; max lat: 49.153 ;